GSAPP Conversationsis a podcast series designed to offer a window onto the expanding field of contemporary architectural practice. Each episode pivots around discussions on current projects, research, and obsessions of a diverse group of invited guests at Columbia, from both emerging and well-established practices. Usually hosted by the Dean of the GSAPP, Amale Andraos, the conversations also feature the school’s influential faculty and alumni and give students the opportunity to engage architects on issues of concern to the next generation.

http://www.archdaily.com/806013/introducing-columbia-gsapp-conversations-inaugural-architecture-podcast-exhibition-models-james-taylor-fosterAD Editorial Team

Spanish, New York-based architect Andrés Jaque (Office for Political Innovation) has been awarded the 10th Kiesler Architecture and Art Prize by the Mayor of Vienna, citing Jaque’s "capacity to go beyond assumptions about traditional practice and urban life." In 2015 Jaque was declared the MoMA PS1 YAP (Young Architects Programme) winner for COSMO – a complex, and beautiful, water purifying prototype that has been installed in Brooklyn. He and his office are also collaborating with Mark Wigley and Beatriz Colomina on the design for the upcoming Istanbul Design Biennial, Are We Human?

"Design always presents itself as serving the human," state Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, "but its real ambition is to redesign the human." Their curatorial statement for the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, which will open later this year and is themed around the title Are We Human? The Design of the Species: 2 Seconds, 2 Days, 2 Years, 200 Years, 200,000 Years, brims with reflective and often prescient statements such as this. All that will be encompassed by this Biennial, they say, will revolve around one pressing provocation: that design itself needs to be redesigned.

If one thing is certain, this Biennial will not come off as a 'trade show'. Wigley (New Zealand) and Colomina (Spain)—both Professors of Architecture at US institutions (Columbia and Princeton, respectively), theorists, writers, and critics—have exerted a profound influence on architectural discourse and pedagogy over the course of their careers. This Biennial, on the other hand, serves as their first formal foray into the world of 'design' – a field which few architects actively engage with.

An image of Ismael Levya Architects' transformation of a six-story parking garage in New York City's Upper East Side has been revealed. The project, already under construction, will expand the structure into a 19-story residential tower that will house 56 luxury apartments. Described as a "lantern," the 210-foot-tall building was designed as "four distinct townhouse volumes with metal and glass."

As the first month of 2016 draws to a close, we decided to tap into our network and ask an esteemed group of architects, critics, theorists and educators to tell us what they are looking forward to this year in architecture.

What are you looking forward to in architecture this year?

http://www.archdaily.com/780498/50-architects-tell-us-what-they-are-looking-forward-to-in-2016AD Editorial Team

In the grand tradition of MoMA PS1's Young Architects Program winners, Andrés Jaque's plan for "COSMO" addresses an ecological need through installation architecture. While 2014's "Hy-Fi" by the living explored organic bricks and 2012's "Wendy" by HWKN addressed airborne pollution, Jaque has set his targets on something that is apparently much more political: water. This article, originally published by Metropolis Magazine as "The Politics of Water: Andrés Jaque on His 2015 MoMA PS1 YAP Winning Design," examines how Jaque hopes to turn his installation into a political talking point.

At first glance, Bill Gates’s robotic Janicki Omniprocessor and Andrés Jaque’s winning proposal for the 2015 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program (YAP) share a similar goal—they each tackle the problem of global water scarcity, which has become exacerbated by climate change, political strife, and a host of other factors. But while the Omniprocessor looks like a cement factory in miniature, Jaque’s project melds its profoundly social objective—to change the way we understand contemporary water infrastructure—to an almost psychedelic aesthetic.

“This year’s proposal takes one of the Young Architects Program’s essential requirements - providing a water feature for leisure and fun - and highlights water itself as a scarce resource,” said Pedro Gadanho, Curator in MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design. “Relying on off-the-shelf components from agro-industrial origin, an exuberant mobile architecture celebrates water-purification processes and turns their intricate visualization into an unusual backdrop for the Warm Up sessions.”

By the late 1960s, two dynamics were shaping a new urban reality in Italy: on the one hand, TV was heavily influencing Italian society, becoming an intrinsic part of daily life; on the other, the social tension resulting from student protests and accelerated immigration had begun to impact cities in a chaotic way. These dynamics paved the way for Milano Due, a new town on the outskirts of Milan, which promised a new, idyllic type of urbanism.

The complex, although traditional in appearance with its red pitched roofs, put into practice modern concepts: its 2,600 apartments, which had access to amenities for education and entertainment, were arranged around a giant artificial garden/lake and were connected via an elevated circulation system. Below ground, the complex housed the studios of the first private TV channel in Italy, a fact that would shape the lives of the inhabitants of Milano Due and eventually all of Italian society.

This interesting urban phenomena is analyzed by Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation in “SALES ODDITY: Milano 2 and the Politics of Direct-to-Home TV Urbanism,” a project that was part of the Monditalia section at the Venice Biennale and was awarded the Silver Lion for the Best Research Project. According to the jury “The project presents critically a fundamental aspect of modern societies: how the power of media occupies other social spaces, both physically and politically. It is based on innovative research combining surveys and interviews with planners and residents and re-appropriation of the mass media language. While based on an Italian case, this issue is present in many international contexts dominated by contemporary technological and neo-liberal cultures.”

Dossier, trailer, and more photos of the project by Miguel de Guzmán, after the break:

In this first solo project by Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation in Los Angeles, the architect prepares an exhibition, with a series of architectural case studies based in the city of L.A., in which he problematizes the importance of such cases as places of socialization and community, leaving behind the stereotypes that characterize them as disconnected spaces, symbols of ultra-individuality and comfort.